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"Housewives as consumers United States."
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Housework and housewives in modern American advertising : married to the mop
\"This book traces the surprisingly persistent depiction of housework as women's work in advertising from the late 1800s to today. Asserting that advertising is our most significant public discourse about housework, Neuhaus draws on advertising such as print ads and TV commercials, as well as ad agency documents and trade journals, to show how the housewife figure framed household labor as exclusively feminine care for the family. Paying particular attention to the transitional decades of the 1970s and 1980s, the author demonstrates that when overtly stereotypical images of housewives became unmarketable, advertising continued to gender housework with the more racially diverse and socially acceptable \"housewife moms\" that appear in today's advertising\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Every home a distillery : alcohol, gender, and technology in the colonial Chesapeake
In this original examination of alcohol production in early America, Sarah Hand Meacham uncovers the crucial role women played in cidering and distilling in the colonial Chesapeake. Her fascinating story is one defined by gender, class, technology, and changing patterns of production.
Alcohol was essential to colonial life; the region's water was foul, milk was generally unavailable, and tea and coffee were far too expensive for all but the very wealthy. Colonists used alcohol to drink, in cooking, as a cleaning agent, in beauty products, and as medicine. Meacham finds that the distillation and brewing of alcohol for these purposes traditionally fell to women. Advice and recipes in such guidebooks as The Accomplisht Ladys Delight demonstrate that women were the main producers of alcohol until the middle of the 18th century. Men, mostly small planters, then supplanted women, using new and cheaper technologies to make the region's cider, ale, and whiskey.
Meacham compares alcohol production in the Chesapeake with that in New England, the middle colonies, and Europe, finding the Chesapeake to be far more isolated than even the other American colonies. She explains how home brewers used new technologies, such as small alembic stills and inexpensive cider pressing machines, in their alcoholic enterprises. She links the importation of coffee and tea in America to the temperance movement, showing how the wealthy became concerned with alcohol consumption only after they found something less inebriating to drink.
Taking a few pages from contemporary guidebooks, Every Home a Distillery includes samples of historic recipes and instructions on how to make alcoholic beverages. American historians will find this study both enlightening and surprising.
eBook
Beyond our means
If the financial crisis has taught us anything, it is that Americans save too little, spend too much, and borrow excessively. What can we learn from East Asian and European countries that have fostered enduring cultures of thrift over the past two centuries? Beyond Our Means tells for the first time how other nations aggressively encouraged their citizens to save by means of special savings institutions and savings campaigns. The U.S. government, meanwhile, promoted mass consumption and reliance on credit, culminating in the global financial meltdown.
eBook
Why “More Work for Mother?” Knowledge and Household Behavior, 1870–1945
It is widely agreed that the burden of housework in the industrialized West did not decrease as much as might be expected since 1880, and may have actually increased for long periods. The article proposes a new explanation: that increases in knowledge on the causes and transmission mechanisms of infectious diseases persuaded women that household members' health depended on the amount of housework carried out. The article traces the origin of this knowledge in the scientific developments of the nineteenth century and describes the mechanisms by which households were persuaded to allocate more time and resources to housework.
Journal Article
“How About Some Meat?”: The Office of Price Administration, Consumption Politics, and State Building from the Bottom Up, 1941–1946
Jacobs examines the Office of Price Administration (OPA), which embodied one of the strongest manifestations of the interventionist New Deal regulatory states between 1941-1946. The OPA served as a radical model of state management--a popular government agency working in alliance with labor, consumer, social liberal coalition that challenged the right of private industries to set their own prices and sell their items freely.
Journal Article
Radio active : advertising and consumer activism, 1935-1947
Radio Active tells the story of how radio listeners at the American mid-century were active in their listening practices. While cultural historians have seen this period as one of failed reform--focusing on the failure of activists to win significant changes for commercial radio--Kathy M. Newman argues that the 1930s witnessed the emergence of a symbiotic relationship between advertising and activism. Advertising helped to kindle the consumer activism of union members affiliated with the CIO, middle-class club women, and working-class housewives. Once provoked, these activists became determined to influence--and in some cases eliminate--radio advertising. As one example of how radio consumption was an active rather than a passive process, Newman cites The Hucksters, Frederick Wakeman's 1946 radio spoof that skewered eccentric sponsors, neurotic account executives, and grating radio jingles. The book sold over 700,000 copies in its first six months and convinced broadcast executives that Americans were unhappy with radio advertising. The Hucksters left its mark on the radio age, showing that radio could inspire collective action and not just passive conformity.
eBook
American consumer boycotts in response to rising food prices: housewives' protests at the grassroots level
A historical review of consumer economic boycotts in the 20th century finds that from the early 1900s to the 1970s, consumers at the grassroots level repeatedly launched boycotts in response to price rises for food. What is particularly noteworthy about these protest actions is the important roles assumed by housewives, both as leaders and followers. Also of interest is the ad hoc nature of the boycott efforts and their inability to have more than a temporary remedial effect on the retail pricing practices which prompted the boycott actions. A discussion of the demise of the price-increase boycotts is presented - a discussion which draws heavily on the changing role of US women in the late 20th century.
Journal Article
Counting Housework: New Estimates of Real Product in the United States, 1800–1860
Women engaged primarily in the provision of domestic services for family members make important contributions to total output. This article provides estimates of the size and sectoral allocation of the nonmarket household work force in the United States between 1800 and 1860. Those estimates are then used as a basis for several alternative imputations of the value of these women's work, which modify the historical picture of economic growth over this period.
Journal Article
Selling to Ms. Consumer
Focus is directed at answering a single question: Given the pressure to develop consumerism in America in the first decades of the twentieth century, what was it about women's condition during this period that made them so susceptible to becoming consumers? To answer the question, changes in the configuration & functions of the family are analyzed. These are then related to the early development of psychoanalytic & advertising theory, which occurred during the same period, & to the particular tactics taken by the advertisers of the consumer products. AA.
Journal Article
Homemaker as Worker in the United States
A study is presented that examines the level of women's labor force participation (LFP) in the US during the 19th and 20th centuries. The primary conclusion is that for large groups of women actual levels of LFP have been high enough to prevent them from engaging exclusively in homemaking. The social vision of woman as homemaker was illusory for 2/3 of the period. Misconceptions of women's LFP are, in part, a function of applying current assumptions of what women's roles should be to the study of 19th-century records. During that time, government record keepers followed the gendered traditions of the colonies that recorded the economic activities of white, male property owners to the exclusion of all other actors. The job of the woman, as housewife, was to create an oasis of enjoyment and relaxation in the home. This became possible only where the upper classes could rely on female wage labor to carry out the real domestic production. The advent of industrialization and the watershed years around the War of 1812 altered the laboring lives of both men and women dramatically.
Magazine Article